Travel - Serenity to Daylesford and back

We've just come back from an 8 day (lightening) trip through parts of NSW and Victoria. It was enjoyable, but the travelling time was tiring! We took 3 and half days down and then 3 days back. One of the things that really got to me was the lack of regenerative farming. I'm on various facebook pages and we only seem to mix with people involved in regenerative farming, that I assume that its becoming more and more common. Sadly, it's not!

I saw a couple of cattle feedlots, some industrial sheds housing chickens or pigs and lots of cropping land that showed a lot of sprayed out country. We drove down on different roads to those we came back on, so that's 7 days of driving and not seeing any regen ag! I sometimes think that things will never change, but I suppose I can only change/affect me, so it's not much point getting myself stressed about it. I'll just keep doing what I'm doing to try and effect change in others by example and education.

The Trip

Usually when we travel, we take our own food, but we didn't take much this time. I was foolish enough to think that the Regen message was well and truly being adopted and that eating places (pubs and cafes) would have some sort of grassfed options. Nope! Most of the serving staff when asked, just looked really confused - I may as well have been speaking a foreign language. Kim got embarrassed when I asked at every place, but if you don't ask, no one will ever get the message!

We ate out throughout NSW, even though our choices were not great. When we got to Victoria, and due to the segregation laws, some of us weren't "allowed" to eat out. We had booked into an airbnb in Daylesford so that we could cook for ourselves - so that was the best food we ate on the whole trip. Daylesford also had some good food choices in their organic shop and a nice little cheese and wine shop, so we could buy good ingredients.

A nibbly platter included some local grown and made foods and some organic cheese. The little bit of bread you can see in the middle was baked by the best bakehouse in Australia - Twofold Bakehouse.

Seeing as it was going to be Thursday when we arrived in Daylesford, I had pre-ordered some bread from Twofold Bakehouse. They only bake two days a week and the bakehouse includes a huge wood fired oven. One of the highlights of our whole trip was to watch the bread being baked. Edmund and Maitland actually helped to lay the cement for the floor, and Edmund is good friends with them, which enabled the invitation to watch. If you've never seen alot of sourdough loaves go into a wood fired oven to cook, then you've missed out on a treat! They had to go in pretty fast and then cooked so fast it was amazing! 15 minutes to cook a loaf of bread! Gosh and the bread tasted so good. I may have overdosed a bit as it did give me bread belly after a couple of days!!

We did take some sausages, bacon and eggs with us. Plus home grown tomatoes, mushrooms (that would've gone off while we were away) and of course some krauts. This was Maitland's meal not mine, mine was a little smaller.

We also did some foraging. We picked some (but not enough) black berries and apples around Daylesford and then coming back through Stanthorpe, we picked some more apples (below) and some peaches (above). I'll probably preserve most of these. These were on the side of the road, and I bet you the people living nearby, go into woolies to buy their apples and peaches.

We just about always travel with our camp stove and coffee pot so we boiled up a brew each morning. This was the last of our twofold bread.

We forgot to take a pan, so we bought one at a second hand shop so that we could cook some food on the way home. Left over sausages and egg pasta, with some veg and a jar of tomato sauce made a pretty tasty slap up meal. 

The biggest take home messages from this trip were:

1. Don't assume that the regen ag message is broad - and don't stop trying to influence and educate people.

2. Always take cooking implements and buy good quality food when you can so that you can cook it yourself and not get a belly ache or a bruised conscience!